There are many reasons why you shouldn’t attempt building your own website. Here are 7
1) Probably the best reason to leave this to a professional is that your time is better spent on other things. When you finish working on your business you want a bit of time to relax, spend time with family or friends.
Website development is a skilled job. Even using a website builder you need to know the basics of web design and SEO. These skills can be learned, but at what cost on your family life.
2) What happens when the poop hits the spinney propeller thing. We all go through life blindly believing that everything will be alright. But unfortunately things do go wrong and when they do its usually spectacularly. So if your website stops working do you know how to fix it? Hosting companies may not be that much help and if your site is not working your potential customers are going to look elsewhere.
3) These days google expects every site to have an SSL certificate. Chrome even tells visitors that your site is not-secure if you don’t have one. Your host may not be able to install an SSL certificate on some levels of their packages.
4) WordPress is the most popular website platform as it is FOSS (Free Open Source Software.) But it is also the most hacked platform, because, it is FOSS. Hackers can and do study the code to find weaknesses. But whilst the core software is well maintained with vulnerabilities fixed fairly rapidly, the themes and plugins you use often aren’t fixed as quickly. Either way its down to you to update them.
All CMS’s provide a way to log in and administer the site. Any login screen is an attack vector. If your using a CMS to build your site then this needs to be secured.
5) If your trying your hand at crafting the html and css for your site then you need to be aware that even after a quarter of century of the internet, the browsers still don’t see eye to eye on a few things. So that cool new feature in Chrome that gives your site the wow factor might not work at all on firefox. Do I even need to mention Internet Exploder Explorer.
6) You have under a second to capture a visitors attention. So your website has to load fast. Enter the world of image compression, caching and CDN’s. If you’ve got a super high resolution image that you want to use on your site it will probably need to be reduced in size, and compressed. Your sites visitors will not be too impressed if you use all their bandwidth trying to download your image.
Caching and CDN work in similar ways. Caching keeps a copy of a page so that when the page is requested again it can just deliver the cached copy. A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, works by storing a copy of a page or asset (image etc) at locations around the world. When a visitor arrives at your site the CDN delivers the content from the closest location, making the site as fast as possible.
7) Sites need to work on mobile devices as well as desktops. There are 2 ways to do this. A separate site, optimised for each device type. Or a responsive site. This responds to the device viewing it and adjusts to give the best visual performance on the device. This often goes hand in hand with performance optimisation for images.
